HISTORY 100
WORLD HISTORY
Lesson 2:  PALAEOLITHIC SAVAGERY

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
At the end of this assignment, you should have learned to following:
● The meaning and importance of the terms Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and the characteristics of each period; savagery and barbarism in their old technical sense; extended family, clan, and hunting band, You should understand the factors that limit our knowledge of the was of life of human beings during the Palaeolithic period, and why scholars rely so much upon analogies with some modern peoples to develop their ideas.
● You should be able to critic the basic division of labor that scholars believe existed with the palaeolithic hunters and gatherers.
● You should know under what conditions palaeolithic groups could develop complex cultures.
● You should be familiar with the cave-paints of Lescaux as at least one example of the sophistication of palaeolithic art.
● You might even have begun to think about some problems.
○ what can we learn about prehistoric peoples from archaeology and what can it not help us to know?
○ If the immigrants to North America came to the continent in about 20,000 BC with the same organization and equipment as those who remained in the Old World, why were so many of the New World inhabitants barely entering the Neolithic Age when the Europeans arrived?
○ What seemed to limit the development of the Palaeolithic peoples?
○ What can we learn about a people from the art they produced>

palaeolithic savagery is a somewhat old-fashioned term, but you will encounter it from time to time. Palaeolithic means “Old Stone,” and refers generally to the period of human history during which tools were made out of stone. Actually, the people at the time made their tools out of many different substances, such as wood, antler, bone, and the like, but stone has survived to the present day, and early scientists used the objects they found to describe the entire period. Savagery is the name that was given to that stage of human development in which people depended exclusively upon hunting animals and gather wild plants for their food and, when used in this sense, the word savage is not intended to reflect upon the character or personality of the person to whom it is applied.
It might be well at this point to go over these traditional eras and their dates so that you might be able to put what you will be learning into general structure.
Palaeolithic
Characterized by chipped or flaked stone implements. Most North American Indian arrow-heads would fall into this category.
Mesolithic
A transitional period distinguished by the greater skill shown in the tools that have survived from this period
Neolithic
The stone implements of this period were often ground and polished. It was during this period also that agriculture and animal husbandry was first developed, about 10,000 B.C.
Chalcolithic
Although stone tools continued to be used, the use of metal in the form of copper tools first occurs. The Aztecs of Mexico were at this stage of development. It was during this period in what is modern Iraq that writing first appeared, and history in its technical sense may be said to have begun.
Bronze Age
Tools appear that are made of bronze, and alloy of copper and tin. Bronze is harder than copper, but bronze and tin are difficult to secure and require a great deal of fuel to combine into an alloy, so bronze was expensive. This period seems to have begun about 2200 B.C.
Iron Age
Beginning in about 1200 B.C., tools made of iron begin to appear. Iron is harder than bronze, is much more plentiful, and is relatively easy to work, so it was quite inexpensive.

Now let’s return to our consideration of the Old Stone age.
Humans of the Palaeolithic period organized themselves into groups, often composed entirely of blood relatives, that we call extended families, or, if they are somewhat larger, clans. The clan was not a big group, perhaps no more that fifty or sixty people at most, If you will remember that Noah, in the Bible, lived with his wife, and three sons and their wives and children. If Noah had added his grandsons and their wives and children, he would have had a clan. On the basis of comparison with modern groups of traditional hunters and gatherers, there may have been of rough division of labor in which the men hunted game, and made houses and tools, while the women gather plants, and cooked and made wearing apparel. So the clan was composed only of enough men to form a hunting party that could bring down large animals, and each clan wandered across a wide area of hunting grounds. By about 20,000 BC, Palaeolithic hunters had spread throughout the Earth, but the total human population of the world was probably no more than five or six million people.
Some Palaeolithic clans were fortunate enough to occupy hunting grounds that provided a large and inexhaustible supply of food, such as the North American Plains Indians and the vast herds of buffalo that they hunted. Others lived along the sea coast and were able to support relatively large populations from the oyster and clam banks. Many of the highways and roads of Louisiana, for instance, are not built upon gravel, which is relatively scarce in the state, but upon crushed clam shells, taken from vast piles of shells that were built up over the centuries by the hunters and gatherers that inhabited the area.
Then, too, there was a level of trade and commerce that might appear surprising to many. Such things as salt, flint, obsidian, feathers, furs, and beads were exchanged across considerable distances.
When hunters and gatherers had an unfailing source of food available and were able to trade for “luxuries,” they could develop complex and sophisticated cultures. Using the example of the North American Indian peoples, much of the art of the hunters and gatherers consisted of basketry; leather-work; feather, bone, and quill work; sand painting and other products that have not survived. From the European Palaeolithic period, most such objects have disappeared and we are left with the sometimes magnificent paintings on the walls of caves such as Altamira in Spain and Lescaux in France to judge how rich a culture the people of the Palaeolithic era were able to produce.

ASSIGNMENTS
REQUIRED
Most books about the Palaeolithic period talk only about stone tools, caves, and bones. Flints and Stones attempts to provide some idea of what life in the period may have been like. Prehistoric Art of The Pyrenees gives you a nice tour of some of the powerful painting of which people of the time were capable.
RECOMMENDED
If you’re interested in the history of art, it would be worth you while to take A Tour of the Caves of Lescaux , since the prehistoric paintings in the caves of Lescaux are among the finest ever discovered and are not accessible by the casual visitor to their physical location. If you’re interested in still more, one of the central locations for prehistoric art on the web is Rock Art Links . If you’ve ever wanted to make your own prehistoric tools, you may be intrigued to know that Knappers Anonymous make a hobby of the pastime. Why spend time looking for Indian arrow-heads when all you have to do is whip out a few of them yourself?

This text was produced and installed by Lynn H. Nelson
21 January 1998
Lawrence KS